Character Analysis: The Bean Trees

Friends do not stay forever, but family, the family would never leave. Dead or Alive, blood kin or not, the people that you share the mutual feeling of love with will always stay in your heart. For Taylor though, one of the main characters in the book, The Bean Trees, she never really had much to lose. So when she starts to get more and more loved ones in her life, Turtle, Lou Ann, Estevan, she starts to get scared because there is a more of a risk of losing them. In which, one she does lose, and the other two would stay but she very nearly loses one of the more prominent “family” members of hers.
When Taylor lived in Kentucky, all she had was herself and her mother. When she did get out of there, she is given the responsibility of a child,
She stopped at a bar in the Cherokee Nation and was handed a child. Taylor never wanted a child. “ ‘If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky,’ ‘I could have had babies coming out of my ears by now.’ ”(Kingsolver, P.18) Taylor informed the lady giving her soon to be named Turtle. Taylor never wanted to have a child or a husband or a family at all, her quote is spot on, but Taylor takes the responsibility of Turtle, she could have easily just turned her into the police, but she decided to keep it. As Taylor raises Turtle as her own, they grow especially close, more than Taylor would have ever expected to be able to love for a child she was given to in the middle of nowhere. At some point, Taylor leaves Turtle with their blind neighbor, Edna Poppy, as she or Lou Ann would normally do if they have to do something or go somewhere, as Mattie take them to see and experience the first rain of the summer, the Indians way of starting a new year. Lou
Eventually, these small feelings grew into something much greater, and Estevan ends up being the one she loves that she has to say goodbye to. For the first time in Taylor’s life, she loses someone she loves. She does get a goodbye kiss though which I bet she appreciated, “ ‘Mi’ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.’He Put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me very, very sweetly, and then he turned around and walked into the house. All four of us had buried someone we loved in Oklahoma.” She then goes on and calls 1-800-THE-LORD and then her mother and then Lou Ann because of the pain she was experiencing. Taylor did not live the simple “barefoot and pregnant” on a porch life, she was never fit for it, and never will be. She started out with a whole lot of nothing and has now worked her way up to a full family in which she is not at all related to in any way but which she loves so very